


Family is a Six Letter Word

by Quinacridone



Series: Lessons in Being A Good Uncle (By one Perry Fletcher) [1]
Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Family Fluff, Gen, Human AU, Human Perry the Platypus (Phineas and Ferb), Mute Perry the Platypus (Phineas and Ferb), Muteness, Pre-Canon, i don't know how to tag, idk general sweetness?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21699592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinacridone/pseuds/Quinacridone
Summary: So here’s the thing.Perrin Theodore Fletcher, former soldier, current secret agent, was good at a lot of things.He was not what someone would call "good with kids".So when his cousin needs him to babysit his son, soon to be step-daughter and step-son, Perry is... sceptical.Strangely, it all seems to work out alright anyway.
Series: Lessons in Being A Good Uncle (By one Perry Fletcher) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1564906
Comments: 14
Kudos: 354





	Family is a Six Letter Word

So here’s the thing.

Perrin Fletcher was good at a lot of things. He had to be. He was a former RAF Paratrooper before being honorably discharged on injury. He’d trained as a secret agent after that and currently worked across the world. He could fight ten guys at once and come out with barely a scratch, had borderline perfect aim, could sneak in and out of highly secure buildings with ease, had faced more near-death scenarios in his young life than most did in their entire existence.

But he was not what a person would call good with kids.

He wasn’t bad with them, per say. He just wasn’t exactly great with them either. Due to the whole ‘not really talking’ thing, he’d never exactly done well with kids who couldn’t read and even when he was young, Perry had been distinctly more withdrawn and quiet than his peers. It hadn’t helped that he’d skipped a grade and had been younger than the rest. 

Of course, Perry was also painfully loyal to his family, hence why he was in Danville at all. He was taking some of his large amount of vacation time to visit his family, and while he could usually do that easily when stationed in the UK or Europe (where his distant cousins lived), his basically-brother-but-actually-cousin Lawrence had chosen to move to the States.

So here Perry was. In the United States. A place he’d only really been for layover flights or the occasional mission with their branch of O.W.C.A.

Lawrence was also getting married in a week and a half. Which meant that he was insanely busy making sure everything went well. Luckily, Perry was sticking around for the next month, not only to see his cousin but also to help out while Lawrence and Linda, his fiancee, went on their honeymoon.

Because Lawrence had a son. And Linda had a daughter and a son. All of which were under 10.

All of which would need an adult to supervise them.

Which was where the whole ‘being bad with kids’ thing really became a problem. Because Ferb, Lawrence’s son, and Phineas, Linda’s younger, were both four years old. Candace, Linda’s daughter, was eight.

And Perry had been asked to watch them.

Which was… fine. Really. It was absolutely fine. Perry could deal with kids. He could. He could keep them alive and make sure they ate and went to bed on time.

But he just… didn’t know how to connect with them. There was too much about his life that he couldn’t talk about, which already made him distant from others. Even without that, Perry had trouble talking at the best of times, and his ability to speak faded as he got stressed. 

Which was how Perrin Theodore Fletcher, retired soldier, secret agent, all around badass, ended up staring down a ten year old girl in the living room of his cousin’s house, while said cousin and said cousin’s fiance were out double checking wedding details.

Candace stared at Perry. Perry stared back. He raised an eyebrow at her, trying to look both friendly and ask a question.

She narrowed her eyes and hugged her Ducky Momo plush harder. “So you’re my uncle.” she said, in that voice that eight year olds used when they were questioning something that was supposed to be an undeniable fact.

Perry was about to make a ‘ehh sort of’ gesture, but stuck with just nodding.

“Then how come I don’t remember you?” she demanded.

He had a pad of paper and a pen for this moment exactly. “ _ I’m Lawrence’s family. You wouldn’t have met me before because your mom didn’t know him yet. _ ”

She read it, and then looked at him. “Are you his brother?”

“ _ His cousin. But I lived with his family through my teens. _ ”

“Why?”

Perry hesitated on this. It probably wasn’t good ‘uncle’ behavior to tell an eight year old girl ‘oh yeah my family house burned down and my entire direct family died, but no big deal’. Apparently, as Linda had stressed heavily before leaving, Candace was high strung enough.

“ _ I needed a family to stay with. And I had a scholarship to a school in England. It was the best option. _ ”

She eyed him with all the distrust and caution an eight year old could muster. “Why is your hair blue?”

Perry blinked at that. He’d dyed it for a bet post final exams at the Academy, after a friend had claimed Perry couldn’t go undercover with bright teal hair.

He’d won said bet and had rather smugly gloated about it afterwards, while she paid for his drinks that night. After that, he’d sort of just.. Kept it. The teal suited him far more than his regular brown hair. It made a statement, one that he kind of liked. It was bright and bold in a way Perry had always had trouble being.

“ _ I like it. _ ” he wrote simply.

Candace read that and nodded, suddenly understanding perfectly. “Like how I like Rainbow Dancer from the Cutie Warriors, but my friend Stacy likes Midnight Sprinkle instead, but we’re still best friends anyway.” She said knowingly.

Perry had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He just nodded along, hoping his utter confusion didn’t show. 

And then came the hardest question. “Why don’t you talk?”

Perry froze. He didn’t know how to explain it to her. How to simplify and childproof the years of trauma that had gone into him losing his ability to speak like everyone else. It wasn’t something he could do, not easily and honestly, Perry wasn’t even sure if it was his place to. It wasn’t her fault because honestly, her curiosity was justified. But it still… was a lot.

His surprise and panic must have shown because Candace held her plush tighter. “Was that rude? Mom says I can be really blunt sometimes. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m sorry.”

Slowly, he wrote “ _ It’s okay. I don’t talk because talking is hard for me. I can physically, but in my mind it doesn’t work sometimes. _ ”

Candace nodded at that, seeming to accept it. She then sat down right next to him. “Can we watch cartoons now?”   
Perry smiled and nodded. Watching cartoons was something he could handle.

All was calm until the neighbors from across the street dropped off the boys. Perry knew it was going to happen, Lawrence had let him know the schedule ahead of time, but he honestly hadn’t thought that managing three children was going to be harder than managing one. 

After all, what did four year olds really  _ do?  _ Surely there wasn’t too much they could get into.

He met Mrs.Garcia-Shapiro at the door and smiled politely when she told him “how handsome” he was, and how he had to visit more regularly. He then brought the boys to the living room.

Perry was far more familiar with Ferb than he was with Phineas. Ferb, after all, was actually his blood relative. He’d watched him for a few hours a handful of times before, while visting Lawrence previously. Ferb had been barely a toddler then and had mostly slept. According to Lawrence, though, Phineas and Ferb together was something else entirely. Ferb had always been smart, but quiet, showing an intense talent for building and machinery even at a young age. Phineas, it seemed, had the same intelligence.

But he lacked the quietness. Or the ability to sit still. Soon, Perry was chasing them around, trying to keep Phineas’s attention occupied for a reasonable amount of time, keep Ferb from finding something new and potentially dangerous to play with, keep Candace happy, all while making sure nothing seriously ended up broken.

It was a lot to handle. Phineas was incredibly creative, it seemed. He immediately decided he wanted to make the “world’s biggest pillow castle” and started retrieving pillows. Ferb followed along, already completely happy to help his new brother with whatever came to mind. Candace was far less happy with the turn of events and immediately told Perry that he had to call her mom to see what the boys were doing because it was dangerous. Which Perry assumed it wasn’t, because it was a  _ pillow fort  _ of all things.

Until he stepped out to grab them all a snack and returned to the living room to find a semi-constructed pillow castle.

An actual castle.

Made of pillows.

Perry realized that he had deeply underestimated how intelligent Phineas was, and how his imagination plus Ferb’s inherent engineering talents were a match made for trouble.

He had to retrieve Phineas from climbing up a pillow-tower, with full on steps and then find Ferb, who had gone to see if they had anything for some support structures in the garage, and then comfort Candace, who was getting more and more worked up about this by the minute.

He managed to distract everyone with food and was just trying to figure out how to clean the pillow castle up when Candace yelled from the kitchen to inform Perry that the boys had decided to make snack time more fun by making a massive track with their electric cars and modifying said cars to be made of apple slices, and then racing them.

Perry managed to contain that mess by giving them both a colouring book. While he cleaned up any tripping hazards, he made sure to keep an eye on both kids.

Phineas immediately wondered if they could use the paper to make a dragon. They nearly did.

Perry decided he was too damn tired for that and corralled the children into the living room again. He looked at the clock.

Only three more hours of… whatever this was. 

It was three hours of keeping two four year olds out of the power tools, calming down their sister whenever she got too stressed out, finding new things to entertain a pair of minds who were clearly far too easily bored by things at their age level, and maintain his own sanity.

Perry swore internally to never have kids. It was not worth all of this.

With thirty minutes remaining, Perry was out of ideas. He’d tried everything but nothing seemed to be keeping all of their attention.

And so, he did something new. He grabbed one of his own books, one on global legends, flipped to a random page, cleared his throat and started to read.

His voice was quiet, tinged by an Australian accent he’d never quite lost. Perry had been told by the few people who heard him speak that he had a lovely voice.

Whether or not he believed them, it seemed to fascinate the kids. Phineas fell silent and moved closer to listen to Perry describe the hero Hercules and his quests. Ferb was enthralled by the story of Daedalus and his wax wings, and of Odysseus’s ill fated voyage home. Just for Candace, he pulled up stories about Atalanta, the huntress who never let anyone stand in her way, and of the Amazons, warrior women who cared little for what the rest of the world said.

It seemed to work. By the time his throat was hurting from sudden use after not talking much for a very long while, Phineas and Ferb were curled up asleep on one side, and Candace was dozing off on the other. 

Perry yawned. The kids had the right idea. He carefully closed the book, slid a bookmark between the pages and wrapped an arm around all the children around them. He smiled, pulled them close and closed his eyes.

When Linda and Lawrence got home, they found Perry asleep on the couch, three children around him. His blue hair had fallen into his face and his glasses, which he rarely wore, were tucked into the front of his shirt. On the floor in front of him was a book on myths with a bookmark placed into it carefully. 

Lawrence smiled and Linda quietly ‘awwed’ and took photos. 

It seemed that his family was coming together. 

For the next few weeks, Perry realized something. He may not be great with kids in general, but his niblings weren’t just any kids. They were family. It touched his heart in a way that stung and warmed him all at once, as he taught Phineas sign language carefully, starting with the alphabet and braided Candace’s hair, and helped Ferb read books on construction far beyond his years.

When Linda’s parents came to take the kids for the rest of the honeymoon, Perry realized that he didn’t want them to go. He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay with them, his family. His kids.

After that, Uncle Perry became a semi-regular presence in their lives. He wasn’t there all the time, because he travelled a lot. But when he could, he dropped by the Danville area, his bag full of gifts and mind full of stories. Whenever he was in town, he’d help them with sign language, since Phineas and Candace were both determined to learn now (Ferb had grown up with it), and take them shopping and look after them so their parents could get some alone time. He’d always bring back something new, something interesting. Books on structures that lasted ages past, stories of great heroes, toys and games from other countries, souvenirs he thought they’d like. Clothing and hair pieces for Candace, when she decided she was ‘too old’ for kid things. 

And then, two years after that first babysitting experience, Perry made a massive choice.

He applied to be transferred to the Tri-State Area branch of the O.W.C.A. He told Lawrence that he was tired of travelling so much, that he wanted to be closeby for a while to focus on his writing and his family. Lawrence, without a second thought, offered him their attic as a living space.

Perry accepted. It was supposed to be temporary but, well…

Six months later, and they all knew he wasn’t going to leave. Perry was officially part of the family. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've never posted something on here before. So that's a fun experience.  
> Welcome to this au.. which I created in the past two days instead of studying. I'll probably post more of the stuff I've written for it as I go, on and off. But this is the first fic, the first part of this chaotic mess.  
> Lets see where it takes us!


End file.
